Grounded: Hollywood Takes Us to Space So NASA Doesn't Have To

After years of looking down, Hollywood has finally turned its collective gaze back up.

At least in some ways we continue to reach for new heights: It was recently reported that Chris Hadfield—the Canadian astronaut and social-media mastermind—will see his memoir, An Astronaut's Guide to Life on Earth, made into a sitcom by ABC. That strange-but-true development follows the grand success of cinematic space epics Gravity and Guardians of the Galaxy, and the near-certain domination of Christopher Nolan's upcoming Interstellar (out today). After years of looking down, Hollywood has finally turned its collective gaze back up.

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The timing is curious, given that America hasn't launched any actual astronauts into orbit since the shuttle program ended in 2011, having to rely on the Russians and their Soyuz for passage. Or maybe that's exactly why we're suddenly entertained by space: Maybe we've sought to fill one very real void with the fictional depiction of another.

There are less-grand explanations, of course. Maybe what appears to be our burgeoning obsession is just some sort of cosmic fluke, less a constellation than a random collection of stars. Maybe the studios bore witness to the box-office success of Gravity—which took in more than $700 million worldwide—and cynically decided to make their play behind it. Or maybe life on earth is so messed up and depressing that we need our dramas to be impossible and remote, cultivating a more galactic divide between our genuine perils and our diversions.

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But I believe that we've turned to the movies to give us something that, for the first time since the 1960s, we can no longer experience without paying someone else for the privilege. For decades we could go to a little socket in the swamps of Florida and watch our rockets lift off, choking up when we saw our fires beat back the darkness. There was a brief, oblivious window when the shuttle even made space travel part of our national routine, at least until those two terrible occasions when it was not. Americans had signed a kind of patriotic contract to send their fellow Americans into space. It was just something that this country did and would do forever.

But for more than three years now, that contract has been broken. There are Americans in orbit right now, on the International Space Station, locked inside a white light streaking a couple hundred miles over your head, but you don't know their names. You did not watch them launch from the distant steppes of Kazakhstan, and you will not witness their return there under parachutes. If it weren't for Hadfield and his YouTube videos, astronauts would be as removed from us now as they ever have been.

And I believe we miss them. Perhaps now, especially, we might even need them. No longer part of our immediate lives, they have found a new home on our screens, these brave weightless men and women and us, together making good our escape.